5 Luxury Upgrades For Your Beacon Hill Home

Affectionately nicknamed “Beantown,” Boston is Massachusetts's bustling modern capital and a crucially-historic American city. It occupies nearly 90 square miles and is home to about 658,000 residents, including its surrounding neighborhoods. Thanks to its sports, arts, and history, the city and its suburbs attract more than 20 million tourists every year.

Hundreds of thousands of hopeful high school students sweat out their acceptance applications to Boston’s list of esteemed institutions of higher knowledge. These universities include the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Harvard University, and the Berklee College of Music, where Livingston Taylor, the accomplished musician and vocalist brother of singer/songwriter James Taylor, has taught for more than 30 years.

Arts and culture enthusiasts have many venues to visit and enjoy in Beantown, including The New England Aquarium, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and the Institute of Contemporary Art. The city’s primary industries are finance, professional and business services, government activities, and tech.

The median price for Boston’s Beacon Hill neighborhood is $1,976,828, and this posh area is experiencing a strong seller’s market. Beacon Hill is an exclusive neighborhood in Boston home to about 9,000 lucky residents and boasts brick sidewalks, ritzy row houses, and narrow streets. Whether your home is modest or grand, luxury upgrades could boost its value.

Below are five of the most popular luxury upgrades for Boston’s Beacon Hill real estate.

In the early 20th century, it was common practice to compartmentalize all the rooms in a house. The living room was separate from the den and separated by a formal dining room. Both the kitchen and family room were in separate spaces, too.

In the last decade or so, the open floor plan concept has grown in popularity. If you have a multi-story Beacon Hill home with a compact footprint, you can still enlarge your floor plan by removing walls and counters. Just make sure to have a professional take on this task so you don't disturb any crucial load-bearing walls.

Every luxury kitchen has top-of-the-line appliances, deep-freeze units, and granite countertops. But a truly tricked-out kitchen for the most discerning of Beacon Hill real estate owners will include walk-in pantries with built-in shelving and slide-out drawers.

Other luxury amenities include a temperature-controlled wine cellar or a compact wine cooler or refrigerator. Ramp up your prep area with a couple of warming drawers, which do triple-duty as traditional warming containment for food, a proving/proofing space for bread and pastry dough, and a must-have for keeping plates and serving vessels warm. It’s a life-saver for families whose schedules don’t always sync up.

Take a nice, long look at your roof—especially if you’re planning to list your Beacon Hill home for sale. Consider if it’s messing with your home’s curb appeal or has become a potential liability to your home inspection. A faulty or worn-out roof might affect your home’s price and any offers you receive. For example, if you invest in replacing a worn-out roof with new ceramic tiles, shingles, or composite materials that cost $40,000, you can increase your asking price. If you choose to leave the roof in place, demanding buyers—even in a seller's market—might offer you $50,000 or $60,000 less for your home to cover the cost of replacement.

Luxury bathrooms are not just functional. A posh upgrade involves turning your bathroom space—or at least your master bathroom space—into a complete spa experience. Creating a spa experience, especially if your Beacon Hill real estate is older with smaller rooms, can do wonders to increase its appeal to buyers. Add some radiant heat to your floors and replace linoleum with stone or ceramic tiles—the more textured, the better for safety and aesthetics.

Replace outdated shower stalls with soaking tubs that have shower features. You can cleanse first and de-stress afterward in a deep tub meant to help you soothe aches, pains, and stress. Add some modern heat lamps to the ceiling that activate by voice or sound, and round out your spa experience with towel warmers. You may never want to leave your in-home spa.

The days of checking yourself in a small hallway mirror before you step out the door are gone. They’ve been replaced by a modernized version of the old-school dressing suite (or dressing room) that adjoins the master bedroom.

Outfit the space with built-in shelving and hanging racks of differing sizes to accommodate shoes, boots, short and long clothing on hangers, and several floor-to-ceiling mirrors. Install lighting that mimics the outdoors and ambient indoor lighting, so you can adequately assess color combinations and outfit choices.

Another component is to make space for a hand-held steamer, a fold-out ironing board, and lint rollers. An extension of a dressing room concept is to add a mudroom or area near the main door to remove wet, muddy, or snow-covered shoes and boots before entering the house, so hardwood floors, tile floors, and carpeting stay clean.

Local realtor Dylan Costello is skilled in prepping, listing, and selling Beacon Hill homes for sale—and can help you navigate the renovation and staging process to maximize your investment. Wherever you are in the process of buying or selling a Beacon Hill home, contact  Dylan today!